al stroke of their script,
they developed an alphabet, making the last wonderful analysis of
phonetic sounds which even to this day has escaped the Chinese, which
the Egyptians had only partially effected, and which the Phoenicians
were accredited by the Greeks with having introduced to the Western
world. In addition to this all-essential step, the Persians had
introduced the minor but highly convenient custom of separating the
words of a sentence from one another by a particular mark, differing
in this regard not only from the Assyrians and Egyptians, but from the
early Greek scribes as well.

Thanks to these simplifications, the old Persian language had been
practically restored about the beginning of the nineteenth century,
through the efforts of the German Grotefend, and further advances in
it were made just at this time by Renouf, in France, and by Lassen, in
Germany, as well as by Rawlinson himself, who largely solved the problem
of the Persian alphabet independently. So the Persian portion of the
Behistun inscription could be at least partially deciphered. This
in itself, however, would have been no very great aid towards the
restoration of the languages of the other portions had it not chanced,
fortunately, that the inscription is sprinkled with proper names. Now
proper names, generally speaking, are not translated from one language
to another, but transliterated as nearly as the genius of the language
will permit. It was the fact that the Greek word Ptolemaics was
transliterated on the Rosetta Stone that gave the first clew to the
sounds of the Egyptian characters. Had the upper part of the Rosetta
Stone been preserved, on which, originally, there were several other
names, Young would not have halted where he did in his decipherment.

But fortune, which had been at once so kind and so tantalizing in the
case of the Rosetta Stone, had dealt more gently with the Behistun
inscriptions; for no fewer than ninety proper names were preserved
in the Persian portion and duplicated, in another character, in the
Assyrian inscription. A study of these gave a clew to the sounds of the
Assyrian characters. The decipherment of this character, however, even
with this aid, proved enormously difficult, for it was soon evident that
here it was no longer a question of a nearly perfect alphabet of a few
characters, but of a syllabary of several hundred characters, including
many homophones, or different forms for representing the